This document is going to focus on Adroll retargeting, treat and Behavioural Retargeting, info to exclude the visitors that already bought (online or offline).

the objetive of behavioural retargeting is to better hit the visitors with the most converting ad copies. In this article I explain how to exclude retargeting campaigns to “bombard” visitors who have already bought (or target them with other retargeting campaigns more focused for their needs), physician you must do the following:

2. Create a segment that will be associated with the event. Segment name so you can easily recognize, for example, Submit_Form.

3. Find a link that says “copy to clipboard ID” below the space where the name has been entered in its segment. This strip of a unique ID number segment to be used as a placeholder URL rule for the segment that will create (and later to prepare the script).

For now, you will use this ID in type Segment and Rule. Making sure you have selected “URL” as the segment type, enter a “+” sign and then paste the segment ID number in the appropriate field. Here’s an example:

4. Enter your desired Duration: the number of days the visitor classification must remain an active part of the segment.

5. Save!

Prepare your page for this behavioural retargeting

Then the script is displayed, called a pixel event, which will have to tie the case in question to its segment event. Update pixel segment by replacing the segment_ID quotes segment with unique identifier generated for you.

The pixel event must be activated through the onClick function button on the page (s) where the event occurs. As an option, many of our advertisers to place the script in an external JavaScript file that is called during the click event.

as it is said in the end, copy the code javascript and put it on a page that you are going to send the user after a purchase (eg video first steps of use, or electronic invoice, or …).

then go again to you AdRoll campaigns, include this new segment your campaigns, and mark them with the button that says “Exclude”.

This is a first step in behavioural retargeting, next months I will write more about other segmentations to increase conversions and your ROI. Later I will put images and more detail in this post. if you have doubts, ask and answer you.

In this article I’m not going to discuss any specific Adwords bidding strategy, herpes but tell you the 5 things you need to check before starting any bid strategy.

To be able to precisely manage your bids you need a minimum campaign structure and control over it.

The 5 Adwords Bidding Strategy Destroyers:

Solve any of this points before starting a bidding strategy.

More than one ad group with competing keywords.
Solution: Add every exact match keywords as a negative keyword in every ad groups that may have competing keywords. For this, you will also need to have a good campaigns structure, I recommend SKAG “single keyword ad groups” strategy (later I will explain in detail my own customized SKAG strategy).

Same bids for different match types.
Solution: Decrease a 10% of bid in this order: Exact match, Phrase match, Modified Broad Match, Broad Match (I would avoid Broad Match, but if you use it, .. decrease an extra of 20%).

Don’t differentiate Mobile and Desktop bidding. If you just don’t take care of the statistics of each platform you may ruin your campaign when changing bids, Mobile and Desktop searches may have quite big differences in terms of competition and mobile usability, and therefore in the amount you have to bid to target each device.
Solution (the easy one): segment by device to see diferences, and adjust bidding for mobile devices (+20%, or +30% …) then, if your bidding strategy if to target a ad position, you could just bid on the keyword and the mobile adjustment will do the rest.

Small list of negative keywords.
Solution (the fast/minimum one): check keyword search term report over the whole campaign, add the filter impressions>10 , and order by CTR ascending. In the first positions you will find many phrases with keywords that are used by people that are not your target customers. Add this keywords as negatives at campaign level (if they are totally irrelevant for all your campaigns). If you want (you should) a more fine tune, do check this report for each campaing and add at campaign level the keywords that are not relevant to each campaign.

Have enhanced bidding activated. Ok… many adwords managers will tell you that enhanced bidding works quite fine, and I’m agree, but if you want to have an extreme bidding strategy control you will have to disable it and be under total control over your bids.

What may happen if you ignore my recommendations?

If you don’t have your structure under control you may loose control over your Adwords bidding strategy.

I will explain you with a simple example, if you have this Modified Broad Match keyword in this different ad groups

adgroup keywords bid Average Position

elderly gps +elderly +gps $2,4 2,5

[elderly gps] $2,5 2,1

[gps elderly] $2,5 1,7

elderly easy gps +elderly +easy +gps $2,4 1,5

[elderly easy gps] $2,5 1,1

Then, after checking statistics you see that [easy gps for elderly] have a high quality score, and as a reward, your average position is 1,1 , so you decide to lower bid to decrease some positions (it’s just an Adwords bidding strategy). You then decrease from $2.5 to $2 the bid.

What could happen after this change?

well, you may get what you are looking for (decrease average position from 1,1 to 2), but maybe not, you may get this adverse result: +elderly +gps also have a good quality score, and because it has a higher bid, adwords will trigger the ads of this ad groupd instead of the one in the ad group of [easy gps for elderly] ,,, this will cause that

your target customers will not be directed to your desired lading page, and

your keywords statistics will get blurred with cross competition between them.

What could you do to solve this problem:

–> Add exact match keywords as negatives in every ad group that may have competing broad keywords.

Glossary / HOW TOs:

SKAG (Single Keyword Ad Groups) Adwords Account Structure: this refer to a structure where you only focus in one keyword per ad group. Each Ad group could focus on 3 word keywords. This allow to have very focused ads, high Quality Scores, and a great control over Adwords bidding strategies you want to execute. I will talk about my customized SKAG strategy in next posts, but in the mean time you could have a look at this article that explains the basics of SKAG: http://unbounce.com/ppc/doing-adwords-wrong-make-it-right/

Check keyword search term report: …. I will continue writing in following days, stay tuned

…

Feel free to post your questions about setting up a succesful Adwords bidding strategy, I will try to reply as soon as I can.

var minNGramLength = 1;
var maxNGramLength = 2;
// The word length of phrases to be checked.
// For example if minNGramLength is 1 and maxNGramLength is 3,
// phrases made of 1, 2 and 3 words will be checked.
// Change both min and max to 1 to just look at single words.

4.- Create a spreadsheet in your google account, copy the link of this spreadsheet and edit this line of code:

var spreadsheetUrl = "https://docs.google.com/YOUR-SPREADSHEET-URL-HERE";
// The URL of the Google Doc the results will be put into.

5.- run the script. It may take from 5 to 20 minutes depending on the size of your adwords account and dates time frame you selected.

6.- go to bathroom

Analyse keyword research

7.- when script finished execution, open your spread sheet

8.- open “Account Word Analysis” Tab

9.- add a new column in left side

10.- sort by “Conv. value/cost” if you had setup correclty your conversions. If not yet, sort by CTR. Start with “Conv. value/cost” = 0 , or with low CTR. In the previous screenshot It was sorted by CTR (a second round after sorting by “Conv. value/cost”).

11.- use the new created column to Flag when you find negative keywords . I used 1 for no-dubt-negatives , and 2 for non-performing-keywords (keywords that you could add as negative, but could be revisited in the future for new campaigns)

12.- Flag keyword wisely. Think “is this word relevant to my target market?” . If you are in doubt, open Adwords –> campaigns –> keywords Search terms –> Filter Serach term contains _______
see the full visitor search query, understand why this keyword have poor performance, and decide if you want to exclude all this search queries.

NOTE: Sometimes, one word makes no sense, and the keyword you should exclude is a 2 keyword phrase. If it is the case, feel free to overwrite the keyword in the spreadsheet with the 2 word phrase. You can also opt for repeating the same process I explained, but this time with the “Account 2-Gram Analysis” sheet.

this is a cool trick to let you quickly change Final URL for mobile devices in all your campaigns at once. With just a line of code.

Imagine that you have set a specific landing page for each of your ads, keywords, … very granular. Now you developed a mobile version of your landing pages (not responsive, but specialized landing page). But the problem is… how to send all ppc mobile users to this new landing page?

Option A: detect device on your site (client side with javascript) and redirect user to mobile landing page. Problem: another redirection that slow down your site, and degrade user experience.

Option B: detect device on your site (server side with php) and return the new mobile landing page. Problem: you will use the same URL but with different content depending on user.. this will not be good for analytics.

Option D: The one I’m using. Just put this conditionals in your Tracking Template:

{ifmobile:{lpurl}/mobilelandingpage.php}{ifnotmobile:{lpurl}}

and thats it!

NOTE: in my case, my lpurl is always a root URL of several domains (one per country). In the web site I implemented this it is a 1 product niche website, thats why I send all trafic to root URL. I also send from adwords other Value Track variables and do a Dynamic Keyword Insertion in the landing page.